"Anonymous has had a busy winter. The group, which appears to be less a formal organization than a loose coalition of tech-savvy radicals, attacked government websites in Egypt and Tunisia. It launched denial-of-service attacks on Amazon.com (AMZN), PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa (V) after those companies declined to do business with WikiLeaks. Barrett Brown, an unofficial spokesman for the group, says its goal is "a perpetual revolution across the world that goes on until governments are basically overwhelmed and results in a freer system."

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On Feb. 4, a Friday, Barr bragged to the Financial Times about his upcoming talk and claimed he had obtained the identities of the group's de facto leaders. Bad idea. As Stephen Colbert summed it up, lampooning the HBGary affair on his TV show, "Anonymous is a hornet's nest. And Barr said, 'I'm gonna stick my penis in that thing.' "

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That's roughly what happened next to Barr, Hoglund, and HBGary. Responding to Barr's public claims, the Anonymous hackers exploited a vulnerability in the software that ran HBGary Federal's website, obtained an encrypted list of the company's user names and passwords, and decoded them. Barr and some of his colleagues, Anonymous then discovered, had committed computer security's biggest sin: They used the same password on multiple accounts. The hackers commandeered Barr's Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, lacing both with obscenities. One of the passwords also opened the company's corporate Google account. Jackpot. In less than 48 hours after Barr's Financial Times interview appeared, the hackers had the keys to the kingdom.